Page 3 of The Summer House

“Rick, I’m on vacation. My schedule consists of things like reading and watching old movies. You’re the one with meetings and projects. What’s good for you?”

He scrolled through his electronic calendar. He didn’t have anything free until a week from Tuesday. Damn.

“How about tomorrow?” he asked, knowing Clara was going to kill him for messing with his schedule.

“Sounds good to me.”

“There’s a place on the pier in Santa Barbara. The last restaurant on the left—a fish place. We can get a table by the water. Say noon?”

“I’ll be there.”

“I look forward to it.”

They said their goodbyes and hung up. Talk about a blast from the past. He wondered if Mandy would look the same or different. He remembered a tall, slender redhead with big green eyes and a smile bright enough to light the world. They’d literally run into each other on campus one afternoon. He’d taken one look at her and had fallen hard.

He’d proposed within four months, they’d been married within a year and separated less than eight months later. The speed-of-light set of events had left him shaken. He’d managed to dust himself off and get on with his life. Obviously she’d done the same.

Getting together after all this time would be fun, he told himself as he e-mailed the schedule change to Clara. They’d talk about old times, then go their separate ways, probably not to see each other for another eight years.

* * *

Mandy was nervous. She couldn’t believe it, but the roller-coaster sensation in her stomach didn’t lie. She was actually nervous about seeing Rick again.

Rather than give in to growing panic, she turned her attention to the beautiful view before her. The pier stretched out into the ocean. It was early August and a perfect Southern California kind of day with blue skies and warm temperatures. The tang of salt water perfumed the air. Dozens of tourists walked the length of the pier, peeking into store windows and reading restaurant menus. They looked happy and carefree. She would bet none of them were having lunch with an ex.

She stepped around a toddler with a teetering ice-cream cone and past a family with three kids, each wearing a bathing suit and holding a balloon animal. Compared to the out-of-town crowd, she was over-dressed in a simple light-green sundress and sandals with two-inch heels, but it was hard to know the appropriate kind of clothing for lunch with an ex-husband. She’d left her long hair loose. Looking at her no one would ever guess that she’d spent nearly two hours trying on every outfit she’d brought with her for her vacation, nor would they ever know that her casual cascade of curls was the result of an entire morning spent in electric curlers. Some things were better left a mystery.

She spotted the restaurant up ahead. Her stomach zipped around a forty-five-degree angle, going about a hundred miles an hour. The sensation was far from pleasant.

This was a really stupid idea, she told herself as she walked along the pier. Really stupid. The next time she spoke with Jo, she was going to tell her so. And what had she, Mandy, been thinking by calling Rick on her second day of vacation? Why hadn’t she put it off until the very end? Why had she—

There were tables set up in front of the restaurant, small spots for patrons to wait or gather. Brightly colored umbrellas provided shade. As she approached, a tall, dark-haired man stood and moved toward her. A tall, dark-haired, reallygood-lookingman with broad shoulders and the kind of hunky, filled-out body that deserved its own billboard campaign. A man without thick glasses or a faint frown, or a book anywhere to be seen. A man who sent her stomach into a five-G dive and made her normally sensible heart start to pitter-patter. A man who was smiling at her as if he knew her. As if he’d been married to her.

She stumbled to a stop. “Rick?”

He grinned. Oh, yeah, a real macho, tempting grin. Nothing so simple as a smile. While Mandy watched him approach those last few steps she had the feeling that the new and improved version of Rick Benson was going to be big-time trouble.

“Mandy,” he said, when he paused in front of her, continuing to grin that mind-stealing grin.

There was an awkward half second when she didn’t know if she was supposed to shake hands or start a hug or do nothing physical. She couldn’t recall reading any etiquette column about this particular dilemma.

But Rick solved the problem by bending slightly—had he always been so many inches taller than her?—and drawing her against him. The semi-A-frame hug should have been completely platonic, but she had an instant sexual flashback, which was crazy because their sex life had been borderline okay but nothing that exciting, whatever he might have told his mother.

She had a brief impression of heat, strength and confidence that made her toes tingle, then he lightly kissed her cheek and stepped back.

“It’s been a long time,” he said, his voice low and sexy. Had it always been like that? She couldn’t remember, and then he took her hands in his, so she couldn’t think. “You look good.”

“You, too,” she managed, forcing the words past slightly numb lips.

Surprises had a way of sucking the life out of her brain. Not a really good thing to have happen when one was dealing with a man who had an IQ about double the national average.

His hold on her fingers was light, yet she didn’t feel she could pull away. Something to think about later, she told herself, along with the fact that she should have felt weird about him touching her hands after all this time and she didn’t.

He studied her, still grinning, as if he liked what he saw. “You’ve kept your hair long. It’s nice.”

“Thanks. I thought about cutting it, but I’m too chicken. For work I have to keep it back in a braid, but the rest of the time I wear it down.”

Argh! Could she have sounded more inane? What on earth was wrong with her?

---